Intel Core i9- 7900X

Ten cores: Just the beginning...

- Jeremy Laird

SOMETHING WEIRD is happening at Intel. Recent years have seen small, incremental upgrades to its top-drawer enthusiast chips. A speed bump here, a couple extra cores there. And that was if you were lucky. Out of nowhere, however, Intel announced a whole box full of new CPUs, a new LGA2066 socket to stick ’em in, and a new X299 chipset to underpin the whole shebang.

The new chips aren’t the usual minor massaging of specs, either. In one fell swoop, Intel has gone from a maximum of 10 cores for desktop PCs to 18 cores, with additional ’tweener options filling the newly opened chasm between the old and new realities of Intel’s high end.